Information drives business. For businesses that increasingly depend on data and information for their day-to-day operations, unplanned downtime due to data loss or data corruption can hurt their reputations and bottom lines. Data corruption and loss can occur when software or equipment malfunctions, when administrators make mistakes, and when systems and data are deliberately attacked.
Deliberate attacks on systems and data can be made by hackers exploiting security flaws, by disgruntled employees settling scores, and even by deliberate industrial sabotage. The FBI reports that millions of dollars are lost each year as a result of attacks by intruders and software programs such as viruses and worms. In the “2003 Computer Crimes and Security Survey” of 530 corporations, each successful attack cost corporations an average of $2.7 million in theft of proprietary information. The losses include lost data, employee time used in recovering data, delays in existing projects, and damage to equipment. Of the companies surveyed, 35% reported denial-of-service attacks, 36% reported infiltration and vandalism attacks, 6% reported theft of transaction information, 4% reported financial fraud, and 19% reported other types of attacks and misuse.
Businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the costs imposed by data corruption and loss and are taking measures to plan for and recover from such events. Often these measures include making backup copies of primary, or production, data, which is ‘live’ data used for operation of the business. Backup copies of primary data are made on different physical storage devices, and often at remote locations, to ensure that a version of the primary data is consistently and continuously available.
Backup copies of data are preferably updated as often as possible so that the copies can be used in the event that primary data are corrupted, lost, or otherwise need to be restored. One way to achieve consistency and avoid data loss is to ensure that every update made to the primary data is also made to the backup copy, preferably in real time. Often such “duplicate” updates are made on one or more “mirror” copies of the primary data by the same application program that manages the primary data. Maintaining one or more mirrored copies of the primary data requires the allocation of additional storage space to store each mirrored copy. In addition, maintaining mirrored copies requires processing resources of the application and the computer system hosting the application (often referred to as a host or node) to make each update to the primary data multiple times, once for each mirrored copy. Mirrored copies of the data are typically maintained on devices attached to or immediately accessible by the primary node to avoid delays inherent in transferring data across a network or other communication link to a secondary node and processing the data at the secondary node.
In addition to maintaining mirrored copies of primary data locally, primary data are often replicated to remote sites across a network. A copy of the primary data is made and stored at a remote location, and the replica is updated by propagating any changes to the primary data to the backup copy. If the primary data are replicated at different sites, and if the failure of the systems storing the data at one site is unlikely to cause the failure of the corresponding systems at another site, replication can provide increased data reliability. Thus, if a disaster occurs at one site, an application that uses that data can be restarted using a replicated copy of the data at another site.
Replication of data can be performed synchronously or asynchronously. With synchronous replication, an update is posted to the secondary node and acknowledged to the primary node before completing the update at the primary node. In the event of a disaster at the primary node, data can be recovered from the secondary node without loss because the copies of the data at the primary and secondary nodes contain the same data.
With asynchronous replication, updates to data are immediately reflected at the primary node and are persistently queued to be forwarded to each secondary node. Data at the secondary node therefore lags behind data at the primary node. Asynchronous replication enables application programs to process data more quickly, as no delay is incurred waiting for secondary nodes to receive changes to data and acknowledge their receipt. Upon failure of the primary node, however, the secondary nodes cannot be assumed to have an up-to-date version of the primary data. A decision regarding whether to replicate data synchronously or asynchronously depends upon the nature of the application program using the data as well as numerous other factors, such as available bandwidth, network round-trip time, the number of participating servers, and the amount of data to be replicated.
Even in a protection scheme including both mirroring and replication of primary data, primary data are not completely safe from corruption. For example, a breach of security of the primary node typically will enable an attacker to access and corrupt all resources accessible from the primary node, including the mirrored copies of data. Furthermore, when primary data are corrupted and the result of the update corrupting the primary data is replicated to secondary nodes hosting backup copies of the data, all copies of the data are corrupted. “Backing out” the corrupted data and restoring the primary data to a previous state is required on every copy of the data that has been made.
Previously, this problem has been solved by restoring the primary data from a “snapshot” copy of the data made before the primary data were corrupted. Once the primary data are restored, the entire set of primary data is copied to each backup copy to ensure consistency between the primary data and backup copies. Only then can normal operations, such as updates and replication, of the primary data resume. When terabytes of primary data are involved, the restoration process is lengthy and the downtime to businesses is very expensive.
What is needed is the ability to maintain consistent, up-to-date copies of primary data that are protected from corruption and that enable quick resumption of operations upon discovery of corruption of the primary data or failure of the primary node.